One of the things that struck me about Vietnam is that reminders of the war are everywhere.  Not just in museums and plaques, but in the fabric of the country.

The first thing that you notice is that there are very few older people in Vietnam.  Most of the people here are young, the generation born after the war.  And in parts of the country where the conflict was heaviest, there are still battle-scars everywhere — the buildings, the landscape, the people.  In the streets, you see beggars who suffers from missing or deformed limbs, either direct victims of the combat or the sadder case of the indirect victims of Agent Orange.

In Hanoi, we were tipped off about B-52 wreckage that laid in a pond in the middle of a residential district.  This isn’t a monument or memorial, nor is it on the tourist track (several of our books made no mention of it, and it took the driver quite a lot of wrong turns and asking directions to eventually find this place, which sits unmarked at the end of an alley in residential Hanoi).

But there it is — a testament to the events that happened here 40 years ago.